شعرت أن كل ما يحدث كأنه يقع في حلم مخملي
شعرت أن كل الأحداث لا تمت للواقع بصلة

When I turned twenty, a man came and told me that my father had died, and the first sensation I had, which filled up my entire mind, was ‘it’s not possible’. And even an hour later, when I saw him lying there as though he were asleep, I didn’t feel the loss. And when they carried him out of the house in his coffin the next day, somewhere I felt a sharp pain, but there was no all-consuming grief. The next time I felt the dull pain was when a man at the cemetery, after telling the family to say goodbye to the deceased, gave the instruction to close the coffin, and they began to hammer, with dull, very dull blows, on the lid, in which they’d already stuck the nails in preparation. In the deep grave, the gravediggers had left an empty bottle that they’d drunk, discarded and forgotten.

It felt like everything was happening in a cotton-wool dream. Like it’s not happening to you. The wake at the workers’ canteen, the vodka that doesn’t make you drunk, and all those people, random or sympathetic observers, and all sorts of relatives.